To modify the properties of hair and skin to improve their condition or state of being, consumers use a wide variety of personal care products. These products comprise various surfactants and chemical additives collectively referred to as conditioners or conditioning agents. Examples of personal care products include hair care products, skin care products, deodorants, antiperspirants, lotions, creams and others.
For personal care products, there is growing demand from consumers to have products designed specifically for conditioning their distinctive hair or skin. A particular challenge is to condition hair damaged by heat, mechanically or chemically through bleaching or coloring the hair. Consumers desire to have such a product for providing both initial conditioning of their hair and maintaining the hair conditioning upon multiple treatments with shampoo or other cleansing systems. Another need in the industry is to move to more environment friendly systems by reducing the aquatoxicity and skin irritancy. Hair colors, permanent and semi-permanent, show color fading upon washing with shampoos or rinsing with water. That is another need the industry would like to see resolved.
Current conditioning systems for damaged hair use one or more combinations of cationic surfactants, amphoteric surfactants, silicones, fatty alcohols, polyquaterniums, amino acids, proteins, lipids and humectants. Wet conditioning of damaged hair is accomplished by neutralizing the anionic charge of the hair by positively charged surfactants and polymer and creating a hydrophobic layer from surfactant and polymers. This creates a reduction of the swelling of the hair fibers by making it more hydrophobic and reducing friction of the fibers, overall resulting in detangling, manageability and soft feel of the hair. Upon treatment with cleansing systems like shampoo's, 2/1 shampoo's, body washes or shower gels, the combing performance, detangling properties, hydrophobicity of the hair and lubricity are not maintained sufficiently, while colored hair loses the strength of the color upon washing.